“It’s always fun to be the villain, much more fun than being the straight guy,” Tom Hardy, who plays Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, said at the world premiere in Manhattan on Monday. And wearing that crazy mask during the entire shoot, he says, was great. “I had something to moan about, legitimately. So that’s nice, as an actor, to have something to legitimately moan about, especially when you’re getting paid far too much money to ponce around wearing a pair of tight pants.”

The mask was designed to look like the face of a very fierce ape. “It’s got a scowling grimace on it, and obviously, it looks quite claustrophobic as well,” Hardy told VF.com. “And I think that something that close to a human being’s face emanates a certain discomfort for people who are looking at him or her, you know? So it did its job.”

If Bane’s mask makes you uncomfortable, you’re not alone. “I just really wondered how he felt in it,” Morgan Freeman admitted. Gary Oldman said Hardy was “very brave” to wear the mask the entire time. “It’s a little bit like the creepy man in the basement,” Oldman added.

Christian Bale claims that he wasn’t perturbed facing his archenemy in that mask. “Because I was in the bat suit,” he said, laughing. The bat suit, Bale admits, was tight and uncomfortable. “As it should be. I mean, I’m getting the privilege of playing this character—I can’t complain about any discomfort of the suit.” And while he had to watch his diet to fit into the costume, the formfitting bat suit worked in his favor. “You lost a couple of gallons of sweat every day wearing that thing. A bit like tonight,” Bale told us, referring to the steamy weather of July in New York.

Asked how he was feeling about this being his last Batman movie with director Christopher Nolan, Bale simply said he was proud. “Very proud of it, very excited to see it—I’ve been working, and I haven’t seen it. This is my first time. And also, I had some opportunities, but I wanted to wait and see it on IMAX. Chris is so in love with the medium—I wanted to see it as he intended.”

Oldman says that wrapping his role as Commissioner Gordon in the franchise was bittersweet. “It’s a bit like being in high school,” he said. “You know, you graduate, and there are some people that you will see again, and some you won’t. But you’ll never, ever see those people again in that environment, so that’s kind of sad.”

Morgan Freeman feels good about bidding farewell to the role of Lucius Fox. “It feels good,” Freeman said. “I’ve said good-bye to a lot of great characters. Not sad at all, really.”